At 23 years old, the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival is one of the longest-running women’s film festivals in the world. To celebrate their age the Festival is focusing on long-form feature length films.
And they’ve got one of the year’s most talked-about films to kick off the party.

Opening the Festival this year is Deepa Mehta’s much-anticipated film, “Midnight’s Children,” adapted from Salman Rushdie’s book of the same title. The screenplay was written by Rushdie himself and, like the book, it follows the lives of two young boys born at midnight on the night India gained independence from Britain.

Mehta, whose last film, “Water,” was nominated for an Oscar, will be in St. John’s for the Opening Night screening of “Midnight’s Children.” She will also be the featured guest at the SJIWFF Industry Film Forum’s Meet the Filmmaker luncheon on Wednesday, October 17.

“It is an incredible honour to have Ms. Mehta at the festival this year,” says interim Executive Director Maggie Keiley. “We started as a night of docs in founder Noreen Golfman’s living room and now we have Oscar nominated directors like Deepa Mehta attending our Opening Night Gala.”

Of nearly 500 submissions to the Festival this year, the 23rd St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival will screen 45 films. Of those, 12 are local, 6 are features, and 14 are long-form documentaries.

The line-up includes Justin Simms’ “Hard Light,” an exploration of Newfoundland and its people through the lens of Michael Crummey’s collection of poems and short stories of the same title; “Indie Game: The Movie,” an award-winning doc about the world of indie gaming and how the characters developing the games shape the characters within the games; Shandi Mitchell’s incredible drama, “The Disappeared,” about six men stranded in the North Atlantic who must work together to paddle themselves to safety; and new films by Jordan Canning, Stephen Dunn, and Sherry White.

The St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival is proudly sponsored by the CBC, Telefilm Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, Best Boy Entertainment, Memorial University, the Newfoundland and Labrador Film development Corporation, the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-Operative, Cox & Palmer, ExxonMobil, The Rooms, Waterwerks Communications, the City of St. John’s, m5 interactive, and Coast 101.1.